Veterinary Surgeon Angela Drabble was just unlocking the door to her practice when she heard her name being called out and the sound of a baby crying.
She turned to see Gabby Nichols hurrying across the village green. She had her son in one arm, and something bundled up in a teacloth in the other. Her daughter was following along behind, dragging her feet and wearing the petulant pout that all 3-year-olds seemed to have when being asked to do something that they’d rather not do.
‘Morning, Gabby.’ Angela looked at the bundled teacloth. ‘Not another injured blackbird, is it?’
‘Not this time, Ang. I didn’t know where else to bring it.’
Angela could see that Gabby was flustered and scared. She frowned. That wasn’t like her. In the short time that Angela had known Gabby, she had struck her as being a very together young woman, one not easily panicked.
‘Well, you’d better come inside and show me what you’ve got.’ Taking the bundle from her, Angela ushered Gabby and Emily into the surgery.
Once inside, she placed the bundle down on one of the examination tables and spent the next few minutes making sure that Emily was suitably entertained with a Shaun the Sheep book and a mug of squash. There were always kids in the surgery insisting that they had to stay near their pets, and Angela always made sure that she had plenty of material to distract them.
Leaving Emily in the waiting room, Angela closed the door to the examination room and started to unwrap the teacloth.
‘Now, let’s see what we have …’
As the last flap of fabric fell away she gave a sharp intake of breath.
‘Oh, my God.’
Doing his best to avoid contact with the sticky web, the Doctor made a quick examination of the body. It was a man, and he’d been dead for some time. The Doctor ran his sonic screwdriver over the two massive puncture wounds in the man’s shoulder. The flesh around the injury was green and diseased-looking, but that wasn’t what had killed him. As far as the Doctor could tell, he’d died of a massive heart attack, and then something had dragged him here and cocooned him.
It was the ‘something’ that really worried the Doctor.
He tapped a finger lightly against one of the strands of web that held the corpse to the ceiling. Even with the lightest of touches it took considerable effort to pull his finger free.
The underpass was full of it. It had been the perfect place to trap prey.
He stepped back out into the daylight, mind racing. Somewhere in this peaceful-looking countryside there was a very, very big spider. Clara stood some distance away, chewing nervously on her fingernails. The Doctor couldn’t blame her. The corpse wasn’t a pretty sight. Visible through the veil of web, the man’s face was contorted in fear and pain, lips drawn back in an awful grimace.
He walked back over to where she was waiting,
‘Is he …?’
‘Yes. Very.’ The Doctor placed a hand on her shoulder and gently led her away from the underpass.
‘Surely we aren’t just going to leave him hanging there?’
‘That web is incredibly strong, and I really don’t fancy being caught up in it when whatever spun it returns.’
Clara looked around nervously. ‘You think it’s still around here somewhere?’
‘It’s possible,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘And on this occasion I’m not going to suggest that we just deal with it ourselves. We need to go into the village and get help.’
Clara nodded. ‘All right.’ She gave the Doctor a weak smile. ‘I’m never going to complain about you taking me somewhere dull again.’
The two of them made their way down the footpath into the village. Ringstone was picture-postcard pretty. Stone cottages, some with deep, thatched roofs, lined both sides of a wide, open village green dotted with trees and benches. In the centre was a tall limestone monument, a war memorial of some kind. A bright red telephone box stood outside a tiny village store, low stone walls bordered gardens brimming with flowers, and in the distance the stocky, stone tower of a Norman church poked up above the rooftops.
The Doctor looked around, quickly taking in his surroundings. ‘Nothing here’, he muttered to himself. ‘There’s nothing here …’
‘That’s a good thing, though. Right?’ Clara was getting worried now. ‘I mean it’s got to be better for a giant spider to be here rather than in the middle of some heaving city centre, hasn’t it?’
‘That rather depends on what we’re going to be able to find here to help us stop it,’ said the Doctor ruefully. ‘I can’t exactly see the village store being equipped to handle a giant spider invasion, can you?’
The sound of a car door being unlocked made the Doctor look around. Not far away a woman had opened up the back of a Range Rover and was loading a large metal tray into the boot.
‘Come on,’ said the Doctor, ‘We’d better break the bad news to the locals.’
Angela’s head was still reeling with the implications of the creature that Gabby had brought into the surgery. She had quite reasonably assumed that she had been brought some bird or rodent that had made its way into the house or been hit by a car; a not uncommon occurrence in these parts. Nothing had prepared her for what had been inside the tea towel.
It was a common-or-garden crane fly – a daddy longlegs – but it was massive, nearly forty centimetres from wingtip to wingtip. Unfortunately, it had been quite badly mangled by Gabby in her panicked efforts to kill it. Even so, there was enough of it left for Angela to conduct a reasonably thorough examination.
Promising Gabby that she would let her know as soon as she had any more information, she had bundled the young woman and her children out of the surgery. Gabby was terrified that there might be more of the things in her house, but Angela had assured her that this had to be a fluke of some kind. There was no chance of there being more of them.
Only partially reassured, Gabby had headed off to wait for the hardware store to open, intending to buy as many cans of insect repellent as she could lay her hands on.
As soon as she had gone, Angela had discarded the tea cloth and laid out the remains of the giant insect on a stainless steel tray on the examination table. After a good half an hour dissecting and probing she had to admit that she was stumped. As far as she had been able to tell, everything about the insect was normal – everything except for its size.
Realising that there was a limit to how much of an investigation she could make into the creature’s origins on her own, she had decided to take it over to Dr Goodchild at the cottage hospital in Chippenham. With luck he would be able to help her perform some proper tests, possibly even using their ultrasound scanner. She had decided not to phone ahead and tell him she was coming. If she started to talk about giant insects he was liable to think that she was losing her marbles. It was better to just present him with the monstrous thing face to face.
She was loading the tray into the back of her car when she became aware of two figures – a man and a woman – walking towards her.
‘Good morning.’ The man had a Scottish twang to his voice.
Angela carefully pulled a cloth over the insect in the boot.
‘Good morning.’
‘Can you tell me if there’s a police station in the village?’
‘No. The nearest one is in Wyndham. But Charlie Bevan, the local constable, lives just across the green.’ Angela frowned. ‘Is everything all right? Has there been an accident?’
‘Not exactly …’ The man and the woman glanced at each other. ‘You might have a slight insect problem.’
Angela felt the blood train from her face. ‘Oh, no. Please don’t tell me there are more …’
The man’s bushy eyebrows rose quizzically. ‘More?’
‘You’d better have a look at this.’ Angela lifted the cloth from the steel tray. ‘I doubt that you’ll ever see a bigger insect.’
Clara perched on a stool in the corner of the vet’s surgery watching as the Doctor and Angela bent over the examination table, peering at the huge insect lying under the bright lights.
It never ceased to amaze her just how quickly the Doctor managed to completely take control of a situation, whether it be on an alien planet or in an English country village.
As soon as Angela had revealed the insect, the Doctor had started firing off all kinds of scientific, biological questions, half of which Clara couldn’t even begin to understand. Angela’s relief at the realisation that she had someone to share her concerns with had been tangible. They had taken the mangled body back inside and the Doctor had listened as she had talked non-stop for nearly ten minutes about theories of mutations and chemical contamination.
Only when he had her complete trust did the Doctor finally – gently – break the news about the body that they had found in the underpass.
Angela went very quiet and pale. It took Clara a few moments to realise that in a community this small it was inevitable that the dead man would be someone that she knew, and probably knew well.
‘I’m sorry.’ The Doctor placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘If it helps, I don’t think it was the spider that killed him. As far as I can make out he died of a heart attack.’
Angela just nodded. ‘I think that I’d better get Constable Bevan.’ She pulled on her jacket, shivering despite the warm spring day. ‘Would you mind waiting here?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Of course.’ As soon as Angela had gone, he pulled the sonic screwdriver from his jacket and started examining the dead insect once more.
Clara slipped off her stool and peered over the Doctor’s shoulder. ‘So, is she right?’
‘Right?’ The Doctor didn’t look up. ‘Right about what?’
‘Mutations.’
He straightened, peering at the readings on his screwdriver. ‘Yes and no.’
Clara folded her arms and glared at him. ‘Well, that’s a great help.’
The Doctor fixed her with a piercing stare. ‘It is a mutation. But it’s not a natural one. Someone has taken a great deal of time, and used a lot of very expensive equipment, to engineer this creature.’
‘Engineer it?’ Clara stared at him incredulously. ‘You mean these things have been built?’
‘Modified. The basic physiognomy would appear to be a naturally occurring species, but there are traces of recombinant DNA, growth hormones, synaptic enhancers.’
‘But why? Why would anyone want to create these … things?’
The Doctor tapped the sonic screwdriver against his lips. ‘I’m not sure …’
Their conversation was interrupted as Angela hurried back into the surgery, followed by a stocky, red-haired man in a police uniform.
‘Doctor, Clara, this is Constable Bevan.’
Any doubts and questions that Charlie Bevan might have had died in his throat as he caught a glimpse of the daddy longlegs on the table.
‘Oh, my good Lord. I thought … I thought this was some kind of …’
He pulled a large, white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead. ‘I think you’d better show me where you found this body, don’t you?’